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May 18

4000+ Global Nurses in Melbourne to focus on equity & access to health care

CHMP Co-directors, Diana Mason and Barbara Glickstein, are attending the International Council of Nurses 25th Quadrennial Congress 18-23 May 2013 in Melbourne, Australia. In addition to reporting on the proceedings they will be participating on a panel titled, The Strategic Use of Media to Shape Health Policy, where they will discuss the work of the Center for Health Media and Policy.

photo of ICN media room

We’ve arrived. It was quite a journey from NYC to LA to Melbourne. We left on Wednesday and arrived on Friday. Thursday just disappeared.  Closest thing to space travel.

The ICN Media Centre will be our base with media folks from around the world here to report on the Congress. When I asked at the media desk check-in what hashtag we should use for the Congress I was disappointed to find out that  one had not been assigned.  A few tweets using #ICN13 followed by a search on Twitter found three hashtags circulating- #ICN13, #ICN2013, #ICNAust2013.  Oh well, it’s a step forward. Four years ago in South Africa only a couple of us were on Twitter. Progress. Slow, but progress.

Student Power

ICN Student plenary The first session I attended was the Nursing Student Assembly.  Student presenters addressed issues on education, technology, access to care in rural areas and advancing the practice of nursing. I was particularly moved by the students interest in developing more clinical placements in rural areas to address the lack of access to primary care in regions locally and globally. One student reported repeated requests at her university to expand clinical placements in rural areas only to be met with resistance. Her response. She created an independent health promotion elective and forged ahead. Other students followed. The message repeated throughout this session is that student nurses are powerful  individually and collectively and are making a difference. They encouraged each other not to wait until you finish your degree and get your license but to make an impact now to address health disparities and inequity.

These student nurses are smart, bold nurse activists. They are nurse leaders with a serious commitment to address equity and access to health care.

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Barbara Glickstein reporting from ICN 2013 Melbourne, Australia

May 16

Mental Health Paradigm

This is a guest post by Alicia Smith an independent writer from Blacksburg, SC. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in health and medical journalism at the University of Georgia. She received a BA in English from Limestone College in Gaffney, SC in 2012. 

Alicia Smith

Alicia Smith

When Dr. Cheryl Gagne was a teenager, she romanticized people with mental illness as charismatic outsiders.

“My image of mental illness was largely positive,” she told a room full of healthcare journalists at a recent conference in Boston. “They were on the margin of society because of their brilliance.”

This view was shaken when she learned from news reports that Mark David Chapman, who murdered John Lennon of the Beatles, had a history of delusions, obsessions, and substance abuse. Gagne was 19 at the time, and the idea that a mentally ill person could be so violent came as a total shock.

A few weeks later, Gagne, then a graduate student in biomedical research, flunked out of school and became a patient herself after being admitted to a psychiatric hospital due to her battle with drugs and alcohol, she told members of the Association of Healthcare Journalists during the conference. Read more

May 15

ACOs: Accountable for What?

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May 15

ACOs: Accountable for What?

My latest blog post for JAMA News Forum answers this question: http://wp.me/p13lz7-2Eu

May 15

Human Trafficking and the Modern-day Abolitionist Movement

This is a guest post by Abby Lishon. She is currently a litigation associate at a large law firm in New York.  She will be starting a PhD program in Criminology this fall and will be conducting her research on sex trafficking in Amsterdam.

walk-across-the-sun-cover

It was the middle of the workday on May 7th, but I couldn’t resist attending the New York City Bar’s luncheon featuring Corban Addison, the author of A Walk Across the Sun.  Mr. Addison’s background appealed to me: he left law firm life to research and write about the human trafficking epidemic.  I’m about to do the same.

The audience hung on Mr. Addison’s every word as he vividly described his inspiration, his experiences witnessing trafficking firsthand in Mumbai, and the state of the anti-trafficking movement.  After watching the film, Trade, with his wife, Mr. Addison felt compelled to take action against trafficking.  However, he was unsure of what he could do.  A short time later, his wife suggested he write a book to raise awareness about the issue.  After leaving the security of his partnership-track law firm position behind and immersing himself in the world of modern-day slavery for six months, Mr. Addison penned a novel based on the real-life tragedies of young girls trafficked for commercial sex in India. Read more

May 15

More than a “technical” error: sending the wrong message

David M. Keepnews, PhD, JD, RN, FAAN, a CHMP Senior Fellow, is an Associate Professor at the Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing and the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. He is Editor of Policy, Politics & Nursing Practice, a journal focusing on nursing and health policy.

Riding the subway home recently, I noticed a Spanish-language ad placed by the New York City Department of Education (DOE). The ad, part of an effort to promote the new Common Core Learning Standards and exams being given to 3rd to 8th graders, bore a headline reading (in translation) “Higher standards. Different tests. It’s a new day.”

It ended with: “Deseamos prepararlos para la unversidad y las carreras técnicas”—“We want to prepare them [students] for college and technical careers.”

A few days later, I noticed an English-language ad headlined “This Spring, we’re aiming higher.” As I read it, I saw that despite the different headline, this was the English-language version of the ad I had read before. The text was largely identical to the Spanish-language version. However, I couldn’t help but notice that the last sentence was a little different:

“We want them prepared for college and a career.” Note: Not specifically a technical career—simply a career, in general.

This seemingly small discrepancy jarred me: The ads end with two different messages to two different audiences—English-speaking and Spanish-speaking families—about the futures they can anticipate for their children. Read more

May 14

5 Comments

Angelina Jolie, Tough Choices, and the Rest of Us

By now, you probably know of actress Angelina Jolie’s choice to undergo preventive double mastectomy, and her must-read op-ed in Monday’s New York Times.

In her specific case, the decision was a tough, but logical one given that the benefits of the procedure dramatically reduced future risk of breast cancer. It’s never an easy decision to undergo surgery. It must have been even more difficult for someone like Jolie, whose income is partly tied to her looks.English: Angelina Jolie at the Cannes film fes...

Double mastectomy isn’t the answer for everyone. Jolie was at very high risk because she is among the small percentage of women who carry the BRCA 1 and BRCA 2 gene mutation.

As Jolie points out, genetic testing is expensive, currently not covered by all insurance plans, and therefore only viable for a small segment of the population. “The cost of testing for BRCA1 and BRCA2, at more than $3,000 in the United States, remains an obstacle for many women.” There are other forms of breast cancer – which may be more difficult to detect and treat.

What are the choices for those women who do not have the resources for such gene testing? Disparities along racial, education, and socioeconomic lines in both incidence and screening are well documented. Women who have other risk factors, who are without access to the top oncologists, plastic surgeons, and other care providers need to know their choices. Read more

May 11

Nurse practitioners should be released from their arbitrary bondage

This is a repost from KevinMD.com

 | PHYSICIAN | MAY 8, 2013

As of early April, you can walk into Walgreens in 18 states (plus D.C.), and along with a gallon of skim milk, a pair of photo mugs, a six-pack of toilet paper, and a flu shot, you can meet your new primary care provider, get your cholesterol checked, pick up your statin, and schedule a return visit. That primary care provider will not be a physician but a nurse practitioner (or a physician assistant, but that’s for another article). Those states, and now Walgreens, have recognized that nurse practitioners can handle a lot more than antibiotics for urinary tract infections: They can practice primary care just fine without physician oversight. And it’s a pretty smart move.Lagging behind are the other 32 states (this map lays it out), in which nurse practitioners are supervised to varying degrees by physicians, the scope of their practice restricted by laws that vary from state to state. In some states, nurse practitioners can’t enroll a patient in hospice, order a wheelchair, or prescribe certain medicines without a doctor’s signature. This is true even when it’s impractical geographically and financially, not to mention belittling. Nurse practitioners in a number of states, including Connecticut, Nevada, and West Virginia, are currently pushing forlegislation for the right to practice independently and improve access to care. Read more

May 10

1 Comment

Sleep Smarter, Nurses!

This guest post was written by Jasmin Zaman, a student at the Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing and the Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York. Last fall Jasmin took a course in narrative writing for nursing students at Hunter taught by CHMP senior fellows Joy Jacobson and Jim Stubenrauch.

11:46 PM … 12:45 AM … 3:30 AM …

Here we go again. As I toss and turn I lose my hopes of getting eight hours of sleep. It’s Tuesday night. That means tomorrow morning I have to meet my classmates at the lobby of the Hunter dorms to make it to our 7:55 AM meeting for clinicals next door. We have our psychiatric rotations at Bellevue, and I am desperate to catch up on as much sleep as I can.

I was against caffeine when I first entered college but on Tuesday morning I haul my fatigued body to the nearby caffeine watering hole—Dunkin Donuts. My mother always warned me about the evil grasp of coffee and energy drinks, as she believed they were the culprits of my unexplained heart palpitations.

Nursing student Jasmin Zaman and friend

Nursing student Jasmin Zaman and friend

Suffering from insomnia is something I have come to accept. I share this constant battle with my classmates, and it is comforting to know I am not alone. We become so consumed by the day’s activities and by tomorrow’s schedule that it is almost bizarre to just stop—and sleep. Not sleeping the day before clinical days, especially, is a recipe for disaster. An internal disaster. My body fights itself to understand the cause of this sleep deprivation. Without the stimulant effects of coffee my body shuts down. I have often caught myself dozing off on the floor. But if I move into the maintenance phase of caffeination with stimulants like Red Bull or other energy drinks, I’m contributing to my sleeplessness throughout the night.

Studies have shown that the classic theory of sleeping one-third of the day does not correlate with feeling well-rested. Factors such as age and lifestyle contribute to the quality of sleep and feeling rested. It does not matter how much sleep you get, but rather the quality of it. Quality over quantity is best. Rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep, considered one of the most crucial stages of the sleep cycle, is “the only phase of sleep during which the brain is as active as it is when we are fully conscious, and seems to offer our brains the best chance to come up with new ideas and hone recently acquired skills,” says David Randall in a an op-ed, “Rethinking Sleep.”  Read more

May 9

6 Comments

Where are the Nursing Stories?

Amanda Anderson, RN, BSN, CCRN, a native-Buffalonian-turned-New-Yorker, is celebrating her 6th Birthday as a MICU nurse this June. She’s currently shooting for two master’s degrees from Hunter Bellevue’s award-winning nursing school, writing with students and for herself, and dodging yellow cabs while speeding around the city on her little bike. Follow her musings here, via @12hourRN, and on her blog www.thisnursewonders.wordpress.com.

Amanda AndersonEach morning, I wake up running. A million thoughts, a million tasks; I usually get distracted in the middle of making a pot of coffee. Instagram, Facebook, NYTimes, Twitter. The last thing I can do is sit with my laptop to write. The voice of my story is buried – deep within a long list of thoughts, assignments and e-mails.

But some mornings, if I push past it all and glue myself down, my story is there, singing its way into existence. Pieces of it, lines of it, waves of text and feeling and thought. Past the distraction of the newspaper landing on my doorstep, the plants asking me for water, last night’s dishes crowding the sink.

This morning, I’m following the fleeting voice of my story like Alice, running through Wonderland in search of that crazy cat. I’ve managed to get the coffee brewing, I’ve warded off my internet addiction for a moment, and here I am.

I’m thinking about a woman I met with yesterday, a grad student and professional nurse. This woman is much older than I, has a family, and a well-established nursing career here in New York. She is studying in a graduate program at Hunter, and our paths crossed last night because, for professional experience and a small pittance, I help graduate students write papers. Despite moderately solid writing, this student’s latest paper happened to garner extra attention from her professor. For plagiarism. Read more

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